The whole world credits its creation to England, of course, it was the country that regulated the game in 1863 through the Football Association (FA), the first football association, but although no one doubts that modern football was born in England, We don't know or we don't have enough certainty about which civilization was the first to play football.
At the recent Mar del Plata International Independent Film Festival in Argentina, a Paraguayan documentary proposes a new theory: that the first soccer players were the Guarani. That?
"The Guarani invented soccer" is the name of the short film and it was produced by the National Secretariat of Culture of Paraguay, with the intention of disseminating the hypothesis that maintains that this people of men of battles and wars, who inhabited South America from the XV, was the one who first began to play ball with his feet.
This theory is based on the findings of the Spanish priest Bartomeu Meliá, who assures that the oldest record that exists about football is in the first dictionary of the Guarani language, written in 1639. 200 years before the English created the FA? 😲 There the ñembosarái manga is described, a game played by the indigenous people in San Ignacio Guazú, the first Jesuit mission founded in Paraguay and which consisted of two teams that passed a rubber ball with their feet, made of rubber.
"The objective was that the ball would not stop jumping, that it would not stop," historian Margarita Miró, an official of the National Secretariat of Culture who was in charge of the historical investigation of the documentary, told BBC Mundo. Miró told BBC Mundo that, "The men played it on Sunday afternoons after mass and there were bets to see who would win."
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Unlike the soccer that we all know, the ñembosarái manga was played without goals. You just had to keep the position of the ball, and the team that lost was the one that got tired first.
The inhabitants of San Ignacio Guazú, in the department of Misiones, in the south of Paraguay, despite the lack of agreement, believe that their city should be recognized as the cradle of football.
They allege or believe that the English could have gotten the idea to create football after seeing the Guarani Indians who were brought to Spain by the Jesuits, and that they could have demonstrated the game to royalty, with the presence of some English who was visiting.
Can you really know if the Guarani invented soccer at this point? Was it the Jesuits who missioned with those indigenous people? Was it the English?
For Meliá, the definitive test came after the discovery of a tribe in Brazil that had never been in contact with other civilizations and that played football in the same way described in Guarani texts.
The Catholic Church also contributed its grain of sand by acknowledging the authorship of the indigenous people in a note published in L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican. The article was called "When the Guarani invented soccer" during the World Cup in South Africa in 2010.
Paraguay, the cradle of soccer, where they played ball for three centuries and today, have never won a world title? It is difficult to believe and accept, what I can say is that there is still much to be written in this story.